Remember that academic fraud scandal at UNC, the one that revealed the term "student-athlete" to be just as hollow and fraudulent as you always assumed it was? Well, get ready to start hearing about many more scandals just like it.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education, the NCAA has announced that it is investigating allegations of academic misconduct at 20 college campuses, 18 of which are Division I schools. The NCAA has not revealed precisely which schools are being investigated, nor the exact nature of the allegations, but the The Chronicle reports that they include college athletes receiving impermissible benefits from professors and academic advisors.

No matter how egregious the various misdeeds end up being—this could be 20 cases of a few athletes having a tutor write a paper for them, or widespread institutional rot of the kind we saw in the UNC scandal—the important thing to remember is that NCAA investigations won't change anything. So long as this system continues to rest on the mind-numbingly stupid idea that education and college sports have anything to do with each other, we will be stuck in this cycle. Colleges and athletic programs will game the system; the NCAA will go scandal-hunting; wrists will be slapped; and everyone involved in the whole sham will go on lying to themselves.